Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Thanks!

Huge thanks to all who commented on my last post and to everyone on Raisetheriver for their kind comments following my Mtt cash on Saturday night.It seems these things are like Glasgow buses ( you wait ages and they all arrive at the same time) as congrats are due to Rosie for taking first in a weekend Mtt for a nice score,to Mair for winning the live APAT Event for Raisetheriver and to Mr Cloud over at Hairygymnast.com on taking a shot at a higher level sng and scudding the fish to win it. A feelgood weekend if ever there was one!

I've downloaded the whole hand history ( all 7 hours 31 mins ) and will try and pick out a few of the more interesting hands to look at in future posts.( just be grateful I don't plan to make a video of it!)

First of all I should probably thank the poker gods for helping me have the worst run I've ever had at the $16 turbos over the last couple of months! By Saturday night I was still down for the month and decided that I wanted to try something different.I've cashed in $11 Mtt's before but didn't fancy fighting my way past a few thousand donks for a relatively small pay off.

My Mtt interest had been sparked by watching pro-training vids and I honestly believe I'd never have cashed at the weekend without them.In particular the Annette_15 vid ( link posted on RTR),Randallin mtt vids from Cardrunners and Z32Fanatics brilliant sngicons vids were the ones I picked up the most from.Worth every penny!

I justified the $55 buy-in by telling myself I usually have $96 on the tables anyway if I'm six tabling the $16's and as such it wasn't much of a shot to take.I did play a few $6.50 turbs alongside the $50k gtd for most of the early stages and my plan was to make enough from those easy games to pay my mtt fee.Of course those games ended in bubble finishes and no cashes, but thankfully that didn't matter in the end!

I smoked a ton of herb,drank loads of Chinese tea ( Green,white and Ginseng mainly) and did a few stretches in between dashes to the bathroom so everything about the game is still a bit hazy.

Even the last hand was slightly different to how I remembered it and now that I'm looking at it again I don't think I regret making the play.

*********** # 615 **************PokerStars Game #18949961130: Tournament #95444505, $50+$5 Hold'em No Limit - Level XXVIII (25000/50000) - 2008/07/19 - 22:25:43 (ET)Table '95444505 66' 9-max Seat #7 is the buttonSeat 3: SirSmokey33 (533056 in chips) Seat 4: Pokerturk (1094922 in chips) Seat 5: mrvogt (932714 in chips) Seat 7: zagga (818896 in chips) Seat 8: The Omaholic (1723412 in chips) >> Not checked since but I was sure I'd seen this screename before and he was one of the better MTT players out there.Certainly the ding-dong battle of steals and resteals we had would back that up.He was one tough cookie to play!

>>> The blinds were huge and I'd already told myself to forget the money and to just play it as if it was the final table of a turbo sng.This looked like a great spot to resteal with a great hand.The training vids had shown me the power of putting the villains to the test for their tourney lives and I would have been happy to take the pot there and then.

zagga: raises 688146 to 813896 and is all-in

The Omaholic: raises 688146 to 1502042 > The moment my heart sunk! A solid player doesn't reraise there without a monster.

SirSmokey33: folds mrvogt: folds >> I'd probably have folded AK here in his position too after seeing two shoves to his opening bet.

Uncalled bet (688146) returned to The Omaholic

mrvogt said, "ak here" >> Heart sunk further as he had no reason to lie and my outs were just reduced by two.

Played more poker,watched the excellent "Catch me if you can" with the s-man and took my boy for long walks over the rest of the weekend.The only disapointment was that the Euroblogger didn't get enough runners and the Bloggerment this week consisted of Mr Cloud ( winner),Wee Gem and me.We're going to suspend the Euroblogger for now and the Bloggerment will sadly go the same way if there's no interest in playing in it from bloggers and readers.That would be a shame as it peaked at 39.I expect lower numbers in the summer but it seems a shame the US/Canadian players can organise almost daily blogger games and we struggle to keep one going on this side of the pond.

I've almost always stuck to the premise that showing my mucked/uncalled hand is a bad idea as it's giving away free information, and in poker information is like gold dust.I also don't think I'm smart enough to flash my uncalled hands and then deal with the change in table image this may bring.